No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview

by noir-york • 8 years ago

76 63 8 years ago

bribroder• 8 years ago

For those who missed it, the Reddit thread detailing the "expectations gap" on launch: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...

"[But] if we hadn’t released No Man’s Sky when we had, and I was sat down talking to you now after we delayed it for two years, we would not have a game as good as it is right now"

It seems like Murray's argument is that misleading customers before the initial release is justified because the sales money allowed them to finish the game after launch. It's commendable that they didn't abandon the game afterward, but that doesn't really excuse/correct/justify the deception--which continued even post-launch. It's really unfortunate that Murray / HG get the "underdog" narrative when what they really did was a bait and switch.

nolok3• 8 years ago

I have no source on this, but I would not be surprised one bit to learn it's Sony that pushed them hard to support the game properly. They picked the game when it was still indie, gave them lots of money to finish it and make it playstation exclusive, paid for a lot of marketing, and then had a major push for refund on the psn (which they "fought" against, because the psn is not very refund friendly).

Given that 90% of the issue is not "it didn't live up to what we expected" but "why is that guy lying about features that are in on release week", they probably didn't want to let hello games off the hook and screw players completly.

CM30• 8 years ago

Of course, a good response to Murray's argument is that if they'd waited a bit longer and released the game with the promised features intact (or just released it as is, without lying) then the good PR would have gotten them a lot more sales and the same extra features they're adding now could have been added anyway. How many people didn't buy the game because they realised they were being lied to? How many of those who did buy No Man's Sky will ever buy another game from Murray and his studio?

The business logic doesn't hold up well here.

fred_is_fred3• 8 years ago

I've often wondered why people don't publish names for people who send death threats. Would that help stop it? Is there a reason law enforcement doesn't want them to do so?

vernie• 8 years ago

What if they used a pseudonym or somebody else's name?

fred_is_fred3• 8 years ago

That's probably the best reason. Even if tied to an email address that could be faked or hacked or just a throwaway.

394549• 8 years ago

I've often wondered why people don't publish names for people who send death threats.

My guess is the threats are usually made anonymously-enough that that would be difficult to truly expose those who made them, and exposing them would also expose how pretty much all of them lack any credibility.

fred_is_fred3• 8 years ago

They don't need to be credible to ruin someone's life. If you talk to people this has happened to, they can't sleep, they end up moving, they stop leaving the house, etc etc. The perpetrators should be prosecuted as if they are all credible.

chipotle_coyote• 8 years ago

A death threat doesn't lack credibility because it's anonymous. It doesn't necessarily lack credibility even because it reads like an obvious dimwitted trolling attempt. Sure, the vast majority of such threats aren't serious -- but it only takes one that turns out to be real.

aw3c2• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching

nitwit005• 8 years ago

I'm sure people have mailed plenty death threat letters with fake return name/address to implicate someone else.

y4mi• 8 years ago

While death threats are obviously an overreaction and should never be done, he clearly doesn't realize what he's done either...

We definitely messed up a whole bunch of communication

You lied at pretty much every interview to increase your revenue at launch.

I know a lot of people's advice is to fake it till you make it, but doing that in the middle of the spotlight is obviously just begging to get your day ruined.

nolok3• 8 years ago

Let's not forget how after launch he acted like you needed to play longer to get to those features, pushing players past their playtime refund limits on stores. For a while Valve made an exception specifically for this game, so that you could get refund no matter how long you played. That's how much "evil and intended" his trickery had been.

nolok3• 8 years ago

It's not just a matter of the game not living up to marketing, or expectations being set too high. On release week, after the game went gold, the guy (and it's not a pr guy or whatever, he is part of the actual dev team, and creative lead) was still doing live interview lying about major features such as multiplayer or fleet battles. The first "release" trailer on the steam store page was showing lots of things that weren't in the game, too.

See bribroder link to the reddit page for an idea of how far what they claimed they sold was to what they were actually selling, and it will help you see that as a cautious gamer, if you actually went out of your way to specifically check for features shown on official release video and/or answered as yes/no question by the game's lead, you would still be fooled. The reddit comment matches direct interview answers with major missing features.

When you see two factions doing some major warring in space, and the guy present it as actual gameplay that's in the game's build and says "Like here, we're at the battle between two warring factions. I could join in, I could take sides." and then there is no fleet battles anywhere in the game, I have a hard time blaming the players for their expectations.

I strongly disagree with the crazyness displayed by a lot of people, and those that go as far as death threat should be refered to the police. But this is not a case of "rabbid fan attack dev who couldn't reach what marketing promised", he put his hand in the fire to grab dollars, he got the money and he also got burnt.

It was so bad, for a while valve made a exception to its refund policy specifically for no man's sky, so that players could refund it even after dozens of hours, because the dev was hiding behind the "you have not played enough, you will unlock it later in the game" trick.

JKCalhoun• 8 years ago

So, not just over-promised, under-delivered, a shitty way to run a business regardless, but outright bullshitting?

NegativeLatency• 8 years ago

As someone who bought the game on launch that was my experience. Yes.

blechinger• 8 years ago

I fought for a refund from Valve for about a week. Couldn't get one. I'm still a bit salty about it.

I forget how many tens of hours I'd spent expecting to arrive at anything resembling what was alluded to in the trailers or demos. It was probably 20+ hours until I realized that the problem wasn't related to progression-locked content. I'd been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed.

I was mad. Sure. But I was more hurt and disappointed than anything. I can no longer trust Hello Games or Valve. Hello lied to consumers and Valve, from my perspective, backed them up while allowing a select few to actually recieve refunds for the sake of PR.

I understand the desire to protect Developers from unrealistic backlash. You've got to draw a line somewhere which, after crossing, makes one ineligible for the normal refund process. I do think the placement of that line should vary by game (or at least genre) instead of the two hour hard cutoff Valve uses.

For a game like No Man's Sky? At the two hour mark I was still taking in some of the visuals and geeking out about what I thought was coming. I definitely hadn't gotten into any of the completely broken mechanics, lack of depth of characters/worlds, or any other out of a plethora of disappointments and outright lies Hello had baked into the game and its marketing.

So now, for most things, I refuse to pre-order. I might miss a few neat things that I would have gotten otherwise, however; I won't get robbed again.

kjeetgill• 8 years ago

Look, we're all unhappy about how this whole fiasco went down but dude, "I'd been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed." ? That's jumping the shark a little bit.

You'd been swindled, sure. Plain and simple. Not robbed.

Letting anger and frustration escalate beyond the scope of an injustice isn't doing anyone any good. I agree though, a more judicial approach to refunds is probably warranted for a game that SO under delivered on the hype. This isn't in the same ballpark of a let down as Spore.

danso• 8 years ago

I think Murray acted badly in his overpromising, but I would argue that the game seemed to have an exceptionally hyped fanbase. Jason Schreier of Kotaku received death threats simply for being the guy to report that the game would be late: https://kotaku.com/i-got-death-threats-for-reporting-on-a-vi...

rm_-rf_slash4• 8 years ago

I think there is something very sad about people conducting harassment and sending threats to creators of....entertainment.

There is so much wrong with this cruel and unfair world, I understand how some people might want to cope through escapism. But when people get so belligerent about the creators and maintainers of fantasies, one has to wonder how much escapism has replaced the reality for these people.

I mean, who cares that Disney scrapped the Star Wars Expanded Universe in favor of their (imho) mediocre film sequels? The fans didn’t buy the Star Wars franchise - Disney did.

Same goes for NMS. It looked interesting until it came out and the reviews amounted to a collective shrug. So I passed.

The tragic irony to me is that as the relationship between the creators of entertainment and their fans becomes more toxic, the acts of the fans (or perhaps more accurately, jerks) serve to make these fantasy worlds as shitty as the real one.

hsljekskfh• 8 years ago

great comment. as an independent game developer i’ve noticed similar things about game players. they are more entitled than saas product users for some reason.

i think it’s because they go to games for fun. if there’s a bug in a game, it ruins their fun. a bug in facebook— who cares? you can just come back tomorrow. and a bug in a saas product, slack or gmail is a reason to go home from work early.

EpicEng4• 8 years ago

great comment. as an independent game developer i’ve noticed similar things about game players. they are more entitled than saas product users for some reason.

How exactly do you reach the conclusion that gamers are entitled because they expected features explicitly said to be in the game by the lead designer and developer? Sure, gamers can be an ornery bunch, but in this instance Sean deserved everything he got short of the perpetual harassment and threats. He literally defrauded the people who bought his game, and that's not hyperbole.

wtetzner• 8 years ago

Funnily enough, I hadn't payed any attention to the marketing or hype of the game before it came out. I just got a used copy at GameStop, and because I had no expectations, I found it to be pretty fun. If they had just marketed it as it really was, the reviews probably would have been higher.

Crespyl• 8 years ago

My experience was similar, in that I mostly avoided the promotional content after I'd seen enough to sell me on the concept.

I saw the concept of "open world, seamless procedural planets, wander around and gawk at the pretty scenery", and I was pretty much sold. Any promises past that were either obviously over-hyped, promo bs that could not possibly be delivered in time, or ads/interviews/videos that I never saw.

I wanted a modern take on Noctis, saw that NMS was offering something pretty darn close to that, and was happy with what I got.

This is not to detract from the misleading promotion, but I do think the whole thing would have been so much better received if NMS was published as the beta/early access procedural survival/exploration game that it so clearly actually was on release, instead of the AAA Sony/PS4 flagship must-buy that it was marketed as.

solarkraft• 8 years ago

they also added a lot of stuff after the release, i think. they could've worked on it a bit more as well.

EpicEng4• 8 years ago

Some people are nuts, and threats are ridiculous, but you fail to mention the fact that Sean outright _lied_ about the game before and slightly after launch. This was not "poor communication", it was intentional deceipt.

rm_-rf_slash4• 8 years ago

I never said poor communication. My subject regarded the entitlement of expectations from consumers.

We’re not talking about salmonella lettuce or a blood test kit that doesn’t work or carcinogenic flame retardants here. This is a product of digital entertainment, with minuscule value to our overall society.

Nobody forced these people to pre-order the game or buy it on launch day. They went and bought it before the reviews came out. It is entirely on them as consumers for failing to execute due diligence.

So what if the creator lied through their teeth? Plenty of people enjoyed the game for what it was anyway. If an investor wants to sue for breach of contract, they can go for it. Otherwise, the consumers have no recourse. There is no fraud without a court judgement, just a bunch of pissed off consumers. It may suck but that’s the law. Change it if you don’t like it.

sbjs• 8 years ago

This is a major reason why I refuse to get into the video game industry. I read on TIL last week that the video game industry makes more than the music and film industries combined, and it shows. Every mobile game utilizes unethical or at the very least shady practices. Console games are slightly better in stability and quality but even more sketchy and ruthless. The industry is run by greed. Reading the story about how Minecraft started, before Microsoft bought them, that is a true inspiration. Make games because you enjoy them and let money be an afterthought. Is there room for that anymore? I don’t think so. The major players crush any competition. Read about Ketchapp. The video game industry is dead, no it’s a zombie, alive but dead, sucking the souls out of employees and customers alike, and that’s sad. But maybe it’s for the better. Don’t we already spend too much time staring and screens and not spending time with people right next to us?

rm_-rf_slash4• 8 years ago

I share your concerns. It was a dinky little text-based Visual Basic game at a summer camp computer area that got me into programming in the first place. By the next summer I was teaching C++ to Ken Levine’s (creator of Bioshock, nice guy) nephew. True story.

All I’ve ever really wanted to do is make video games. I have always been fascinated with the ways an interactive narrative can evoke emotions in ways that prior forms of art could never do. Fans of Spec Ops: The Line will know exactly what I mean.

But every story of games development sounds more depressing and horrific than the next. Hours are long, pressures are high, fans are ruthless, and keeping a job depends on your game selling enough to justify a sequel (RIP, Mass Effect. You deserved better).

I always hold out the hope that development in game making frameworks will allow bedroom programmers to eventually create games on par with the big budget productions we have today, but games development is so talent-driven and expensive, I have never felt that that time is near in the way we have been lead to believe about other futuristic technologies like self-driving cars.

I agree that much of the games industry is a zombie these days. How I long for the halcyon days of the Playstation 2...

root_axis3• 8 years ago

I don't feel bad for the guy. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences, but the bottom line is that Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. As an actual engineer, I think he is especially culpable because he knew he was spinning falsehoods for hype and pre-orders. I also have disdain for the guy on a professional level because it's really easy to bootstrap a product if you convincingly lie about all the tech but take everyone's money anyway then "ask forgiveness" after the fact. It's disgusting.

Edit for the downvoters: Where am I wrong? Do you disagree that he explicitly lied or do you disagree that people who issue online death threats deserve severe legal consequences?

lfam• 8 years ago

The problem is your second sentence which is structured like this:

"Obviously death threats are unacceptable [...] but [...]".

CryoLogic• 8 years ago

I don't see what's wrong with that. The idea he is trying to get across is that death threats are not appropriate, but the CEO Sean Murray is indeed a lier and betrayed a large audience who believed in him and gave him a huge sum of pre-orders. Unhappiness is to be expected from a company who's CEO is a pathological lier.

Watch his interviews - he talks about it being an MMO style game in some of them, where you can meet your friends and explore side by side. Literally claims the game is multiplayer and it is labeled as co-op before launch. Players buy the game and realize there is literally no co-op whatsoever on launch day.

Sean Murray was involved in the engineering efforts, and knew he was outright lying to the media. It wasn't like he was a detached CEO of a large company not engaged in engineering so he didn't really know what was going on. No, he knew all the features he claimed where not real. He flat out took advantage of all of his customers.

root_axis3• 8 years ago

I can see how some might misinterpret that statement to mean that I am suggesting that the death threats were justified. I am not, and that is why I was explicit with my language explaining that it is an unacceptable crime that deserves severe legal consequences. The sentences that follow the "but" do not contradict my condemnation of anonymous death threats. Hopefully that makes things clear.

Kalium• 8 years ago

You're absolutely right! The structure exhibits significant opportunity for improvement. Here, let me propose an alternative structure that avoids the issue you so rightly and correctly highlight:

Sean Murray received a lot of money and publicity based on very public and explicit lies regarding the tech of his game. Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences.

Again, you're completely right. There should under no circumstances ever be any caveats in any way, shape, form, or manner that could be even remotely read to justify such horrific behavior.

It is also faintly possible that there might be other aspects of these events that may merit genuine discussion. Some people might go so far as to say that such aspects should be up for discussion independently of any horrific behavior that may have taken place.

Expressing this nuance does take some modicum of rhetorical skill, which not everyone has had the experience to properly acquire. With this in mind, it might be wise to consider if comments can be read charitably.

bengale• 8 years ago

I think its that no-one thinks "Obviously death threats are unacceptable and the perpetrators deserve severe legal consequences" requires a but after it.

root_axis3• 8 years ago

See my reply to lfam. In short, what I wrote after the "but" does not contradict what I wrote before it. e.g. "I went to the store but I didn't have any money."

makecheck• 8 years ago

It’s kind of amazing how much money and faith people dump into games for “nothing”. Crowd-funding and pre-orders are both money for “nothing” (no idea if you’ll even get what you expected). Gems and other game items are “nothing” (they’re not real things, the day the game server dies they go away). The overwhelming majority of previews are cinematics that show an idealized story with NO gameplay, and again people invest based on this “nothing”.

Yet heaven forbid Netflix raise its prices by a dollar, or a restaurant, etc. There are so many miniscule investments that people refuse to make. Game company promising the world though? Wallets open!

LoSboccacc• 8 years ago

It was weird to watch the NMS train wreck happen in such fashion.

Critical people were actively warning people this would happen, and yet everyone went literally nuts for a scripted cinematic.

The whole thing smelled from the beginning, because there's people showing demos, there's people showing cinematic, but Murray showed a cinematic with a controller on hand pretending it was a demo. That's, like, as red as a flag could get.

I'm glad the studio survived the whole con job, because the 500000 or so people getting sold on a dream actually made possible for them to survive to the NEXT patch, which is making me even consider the possibility of a purchase if the reviews are good and the netcode/servers are proven able to handle the load.

But a word of warning, this is just them doing marketing before a major patch, so I'd be wary of the article content given the suspicious timing.

That said, I wish people could live up to their mistakes instead of throwing death threats and harassing other people. For whatever Murray did, that kind of behavior is never warranted.

krylon• 8 years ago

So, this is totally OT, I just realized that death threats are the human equivalent to DDOS attacks.

To the attacker, it is cheap, writing a letter/email/whatever that threatens someone's life is no more difficult or expensive than a Thank You-note.

To the recipient, however, the situation is inverse: When your life is at stake, you cannot afford to not take them seriously, because you do not know how serious the sender is about it.

That is a really shitty thing to do to someone.

ben509• 8 years ago

I remember thinking to myself: ‘Maybe when you’re sending a death threat about butterflies in a game, you might be the bad guy.’”

You might also _really_ like butterflies.

013a• 8 years ago

If anyone wants a summary of the situation at launch, this YouTube video ranks among the "all time classic" videos ever made; its an absolutely depressing, satirical, hilarious view into the situation [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ

user982• 8 years ago

I hoped that link would be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik

Randin• 8 years ago

That's pretty damning.

gottam• 8 years ago

They knew what they were doing. They most certainly reached a point where they realized they wouldn't deliver on the hype and speculation they were generating, so they had the option to either tell people before launch it to dial back expectations, or to double down to sell more and assume people will get over it. They even went as far as not send out review copies before launch so their fans had no warning to cancel their preorders.

This is not the first or will it be the last game to fail to deliver on promises, but the game was practically designed to sell around broken promises. The backlash was understandable, and simply more than they expected. My surprise is that the article doesn't read of regret for making poor decisions but more of victimhood like they didn't deserve the backlash.

The biggest thing they didn't consider about is the fact that there's a large subset of gamers that have tons of time but not a lot of money, so the money is incredibly important to them and when they're duped into buying something like that which drastically didn't deliver, they have a lot of time to spend to make other peoples lives miserable. Just imagine how angry these people got.

bufferoverflow• 8 years ago

“The internet is really good at knowing when somebody has made a mistake,”

Hmmm, no, it wasn't a mistake, you lied. Many times.

He definitely doesn't deserve death threats, but I have no sympathy for him otherwise. Instead of admitting the promised game features will not happen, he chose to lie.

jefe_• 8 years ago

When discussing system features/status with stakeholders, I've found it can be dangerously easy to shift from concrete certainties to more of a brainstorming, thinking-out-loud type dialogue. The problem is that stakeholders often can't tell the difference between the two and while you're internalizing and assessing the practicality of their request, they're hearing confirmation of the feature's necessity and practicality. Once they have the impression a feature will be there, it is tricky to walk that back. Once I realized this, a simple language shift helped increase clarity:

old: "Idea" -> "hmm, yeah we could...{thinking out loud}"

new: "Idea" -> "interesting, let me look into that, check with some people, and get back to you" or "interesting, there are a lot of pieces to that, how would you prioritize this against {comparable item}?"

That said, it sounds like No Man's Sky team was performing unprompted brainstorming sessions during public interviews, which is really unwise and essentially inviting people to be disappointed...

clhodapp• 8 years ago

It would be nice and pleasant if that were true but if you go back and watch Sean Murray's interviews it is clear that it wasn't brainstorming. He really did say that the game had things in it that did not have at launch.

zamalek2• 8 years ago

Tagline: [Murray and] Hello Games coded a near-infinite universe and survived a harassment ordeal

Murray did survive a harassment ordeal and was a victim. Hello Games was held accountable and was not a victim - gamers who were lied to were victims.

This whole fiasco was at the pinnacle of the industry lying to consumers. Hello Games concentrated this practice and exploited it to deceive gamers into pre-ordering. The resulting fallout corrected this and it is absolutely justified that the worst offender bore the brunt of the consequences.

The game is still full AAA price but plays like an indie title. Their promotional content is not in-game and is deceptive. Hello Games hasn't learned anything at all and really doesn't deserve a pity piece such as this one.

IshKebab• 8 years ago

Yeah also "coded a near-infinite universe" is exactly the kind of misleading nonsense that got them into this trouble in the first place.

watwut3• 8 years ago

"was held accountable" here is euphemism for harassment, which is not fine nor "holding accountable" and make them victim.

Demanding money back, writing articles about game being bad, suing them, reporting them to authorities (lying in ads can lead to fines) are holding accountable steps.

Harassment is not "consequences", it is just another attempt to euphemism it away. A lot of harassment is not from paying people or wronged customers anyway, it is from people who like to do harassment and do it for fun. This excuse making is quite typical for gaming culture, but just leads to more harassment by next confident emotionally unstable assholes.

zamalek2• 8 years ago

You cannot harass a legal entity. It has no emotions. That is precisely why I drew a clear line between Murray and Hello Games.

oxide• 8 years ago

Demanding money back is not harrassment, especially after being conned.

nortiero• 8 years ago

Sorry, I don't buy it. Man kept overpromising (somebody would say "lying") even after release. Now he's on a publicity stunt for the latest and greatest product, addon, whatever, and cheaply plays the always popular victim card. Nobody says that maybe some angry commenters where "overpromising" too, with their enormous and unpractical threats. The journalist is of course thrilled to expose weirdos -- the correct type of weirdos, so to speak -- to his small court of readers, for outrage and clicks. A deal is made to reciprocal benefit.

dorkwood• 8 years ago

I was extremely skeptical from the start because I saw the same thing play out 10 years ago when Maxis released Spore. Don’t buy into the hype and you can’t be disappointed.

No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’

Related Stories